India's school for the poor but gifted

Anuj Chopra, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: July 25. 2009 11:57AM UAE / July 25. 2009 7:57AM GMT

PATNA, INDIA // On a recent evening, a gaggle of students huddled together on wobbly wooden benches in a spartan classroom under a tin-shed, celebrating their new-found achievement with milk cakes.

“If I hadn’t made it,” remarked 17-year-old Vishwaraj Anand, one the students, “I would have to toil all my life in my father’s paddy farm. Now I’m a step closer to going to Nasa to study about the worlds beyond.”

Their teacher, a short, slightly stout, man called Anand Kumar, stood before the dusty blackboard, wearing a beaming smile.

These students recently passed an undergraduate entrance test. But not just any ordinary test.

For a whole year, they slogged with a singular obsession of gaining admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), a string of 15 top-notch engineering colleges – the Indian equivalent of Ivy League schools – which, since India’s independence, have created some of the world’s brightest tech wizards and engineering geniuses.

IITs are notoriously selective in their admission procedure. About 384,977 students took their Joint Entrance Test (IIT-JEE) this year, hankering after 8,295 seats, indicating an admission rate of around two per cent, the most competitive in the world. (That at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard hovers around nine per cent).

Only 10,035 cracked the test this year. Thirty of them sat in this ramshackle classroom.

They belong to Super-30, a batch of meritorious students, all from cripplingly poor backgrounds, some from the rural interiors of Bihar, one of India’s most backward states. They study under the tutelage of Mr Kumar, an avid mathematician, who since 2002 has run a private IIT-coaching academy in Patna.

Every year, Mr Kumar, 36, hand picks his batch of 30 meritorious students. His motto: to coach the most talented among Bihar’s neediest.

This year, for the second consecutive year, all 30 from Mr Kumar’s Super-30 batch cracked IIT-JEE.

“I couldn’t be more proud,” Mr Kumar said.

In many ways, for Mr Kumar’s students, the do-or-die obsession to gain admission into IIT is emblematic of a Dickensian struggle against all odds for a place in the world. Getting in is a tooth and nail struggle to escape the trap of grinding poverty they grew up in.

It is a mission that Mr Kumar closely identifies with.

In the mid 1990s, Mr Kumar could not realise his dream of studying at Cambridge in the UK even after he gained admission, because of a lack of funds. After his father died of illness while he was still a student, Mr Kumar funded his studies going door-to-door selling poppadums prepared by his mother. On the side, he privately tutored students in a subject he loved: mathematics.

For a long time, Mr Kumar had been toying with an inchoate idea of helping other students achieve what he could not.

One day, one of his students sidled up to him and wept. He could not afford Mr Kumar’s annual fee of US$30 as his father had not yet harvested the potato crop.

Mr Kumar was so stirred by his plea he decided to create a separate batch of 30 in 2002 for the most deserving students who had no means of paying. He supported them from the income generated from students from affluent families who can afford to pay.

He coached them for free and paid for their lodging. His mother cooked all their meals. For months, he stoically toiled with their books till 2am every night. On the big day, he dropped them at their test centre, and waited.

That year, 18 from Super-30 cracked IIT. It was a stupendous start.

Mr Kumar was buoyed to keep going. The following year, the number climbed to 22.

The list of successful candidates grew longer every year. It included the kin of rickshaw pullers, brick kiln labourers and landless farmers. Mr Kumar was altering destinies and reshaping their lives.

“Basically, all poor lack confidence even if they have the brains,” Mr Kumar said. “You instil confidence in them, and the world is their oyster.”

A tangle of narrow lanes snake through a labyrinth of old, decaying buildings to a brick-and-stucco home on the outskirts of Patna, where Nirmala Devi lives with her son, Satish, on a widow’s pension of 400 rupees per month.

“Poverty is a curse we are born into,” she said. “For a long time it appeared there would be no escape.”

But Mr Kumar had a hand in changing that.

Last year, Satish, 18, gained 5,712 on IIT-JEE’s merit list, a decent rank to get him a seat in chemical engineering at IIT in Guwahati.

Ms Devi is proud that her son has achieved what many in the neighbourhood can only dream of.

“If you’re a high school graduate you are looked up to in this area,” she said. “My son is going to IIT.”

It was not an easy time. Surviving on a meagre pension, she often could not afford to pay Satish’s school fees.

“She’d offer me a kilo of rice or lentils, pleading with me not to take her son off the school roster,” remembers Baldev Prasad, the school principal of Modern Children’s Academy, the school Satish attended before joining Super-30.

“I saw how she could only afford to feed her son salt and bread. I didn’t have the heart to turn her down.”

The school, next to a putrescent rubbish dump, is symptomatic of Bihar’s decaying education system. The musty, mould-infested two-storey school building had broken chairs, graffiti-plastered tables, and its algae-green walls were covered by cobwebs.

The experience of learning under Mr Kumar was unique, Satish said.

“He taught me how to think.”

For the entire year, Super-30s students are subjected to a rigorous schedule.

“For a year, you walk, eat, sleep, and dream IIT,” he said. “There’s no room for anything else.”

A series of mock tests are conducted every day. And Mr Kumar’s unique teaching methods helped him hone analytical skills.

“To solve differential equation problems, for example, he taught us that the only rule is that there are no rules,” he said.

Students were encouraged, he remembers, to think like a private eye investigating a neighbourhood robbery.

“Keep picking up clues, eliminating suspects step by step, until the thief is caught,” Satish said.

To explain arduous algebra theorems, Mr Kumar often employed stories as a teaching aid. He invented Rikki and Bholu, two apocryphal characters that all students can closely identified with.

Rikki is a suave, bike-riding, cola-guzzling young boy with average intelligence. Bholu, on the other hand, is a clumsy-looking, pyjama-clad village bumpkin, also with average intelligence.

But Rikki takes the long, conventional approach to solving maths problems. And Bholu reflects, contemplates, and comes up with smart, elegant solutions in a shorter period of time.

“For every maths problem, I make them realise that Rikki takes approach A which is longer and a waste of time, and Bholu takes approach B which is smarter and quicker,” Mr Kumar said. “In every story, I make Bholu emerge as the hero. I encourage them to think – and win – like Bholu.”

With time, Super-30s popularity has grown with its success. Thousands of students every year yearn to be a part of the dream batch. Mr Kumar selects the students through a written entrance test he conducts around Bihar state.

“The general perception is that if you can crack Super-30s entrance test, you’ll crack IIT-JEE,” Satish said.

But passing his written test is not enough. Mr Kumar personally screens the financial background of each student, and selects the most deserving.

A couple of years ago, a young student fibbed about his economic background to wriggle his way in.

“He was clad in tattered banyan, portraying he was poor,” Mr Kumar said.

“But when I looked at his feet, I noticed he was wearing expensive Nike trainers.” The candidate’s lie was nailed – he turned out to be the son of an influential bureaucrat in the Bihar government.

“While leaving, the boy said something that touched my heart,” Mr Kumar said. “‘I wish I were poor.’”

Super-30s popularity has come at a price: a slew of Fake Super 30s who claim to have Mr Kumar on their faculty boards.

And in recent years, Mr Kumar has received death threats from notorious criminals like Bindu Singh, who is currently lodged in Bihar’s Beur jail.

“He made calls from prison through a cell phone,” he said. “I know he did it at the behest of Bihar’s coaching institutes – the state’s education mafia – who feel threatened Super-30 will hurt their business.”

In 2004, one of Mr Kumar’s non-teaching staff was stabbed at his residence by an unidentified visitor. He had a narrow escape months later when a crude bomb hurled at him on the streets of Patna.

Mr Kumar is guarded around the clock by three policemen carrying AK-47 rifles. He also keeps a personal licensed gun with him when he steps out.

But he is in no way deterred by thethreats. This year, buoyed by Super-30s success, Mr Kumar will treble his intake, admitting students from neighbouring states of Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh as well.

He has been flooded with offers of funding from private and international donors. But he does not want to accept aid at the cost of compromising his institute’s autonomy.

“I want to prove that you can help make a difference with or without outside funding,” he said. “Only your intentions need to be noble.”

achopra@thenational.ae